


Spirits Moaning Among the Tombstones

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke pre-romance or close friendship, Canon Compliant, F/M, Halloween, Post-Canon, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 12:26:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8667685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: “You don’t find all this a bit…creepy, though?” she asks, after a moment.   “It’s a graveyard at dusk in the fog,” he answers. “Of course it’s creepy."





	

**Author's Note:**

> I intended to write this for Halloween but then it took me forever to get it even sort of how I wanted it so...here it is now. Set either waaaaaay post-S3 (once the apocalypse 2.0 threat is dealt with) or in a canon-divergent AU where S3 never happened. 
> 
> Title from Pet Semetary by The Ramones.

They reach the graveyard gates just as the sun is starting to burn low against the skyline, a gray autumn dusk infusing the air. A low stone wall, discolored by lichen and moss, extends out from either side of the ornate, wrought iron entranceway. The gate itself is distorted with rust, and the right-side panel, no longer latched securely to the left, creaks with a gruff, high-pitched whine when Clarke gives it a push. She lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding, and glances back at Bellamy, lips slightly parted, eyebrows raised.  

He only shrugs, and hitches his makeshift backpack higher on his shoulders. “What did you expect was going to happen?” he asks. “Old things make creaky noises.”  

Clarke gives a half-roll of her eyes, drops her shoulders, and faces forward again. Through the gate, she can see rows and rows of once-neat gravestones, overrun by tall, dead grass and weeds, the paths between them obscured by fallen leaves from the bare-limbed trees above. Most of the grave markers are simple, uniform stone squares. A few are larger: tall crosses, statues of angels, looming obelisks. The chill, wet day is turning into an overcast evening. Low gray fog gives the scene on ambiguous, uncertain cast  

She doesn’t realize how long she’s been staring until Bellamy, behind her, clear his throat. “Are you going in or do you want me to lead the way?”  

Clarke crosses her arms against her chest, glances back over her shoulder. “It’s getting dark out and you want to go exploring in a graveyard?” She’ll admit that there’s something intriguing about the place: creepy, just a little too quiet; the way the tree branches move in the wind sends a chill across her skin and a part of her says this is a warning, and a part of her says: more like an invitation. She’s curious. But she also doubts there’s much of anything useful in a burial ground and the day ends so early in this part of the year.  

“I didn’t say anything about exploring,” Bellamy answers. He strides past her, pushes the gate open a bit wider, and slips inside. “If there’s a cemetery here, there’s probably a town on the other side. We’re never going to make it back to Arkadia before nightfall, but if we walk through here, we might find someplace to camp out away from the cold. And we can take a look around in the morning, see if there’s anything there to make this whole exploratory trip worth it.”  

Clarke sighs. That is, of course, reasonable enough. She takes a step forward, peers in through the gate and watches as the fog, thick and hovering low to the ground, continues to roll in, hiding all but the closest headstones from view. It’s impossible to know how far the cemetery extends. The scene brings on a sense of unease, but the unease doesn’t outweigh her interest, or her desire for a roof over her head when the temperature drops. So she slips in through the slim opening of the gate, and soon falls into step beside Bellamy as they head down the widest path, straight down the center of the graveyard.  

“You don’t find all this a bit…creepy, though?” she asks, after a moment.  

“It’s a graveyard at dusk in the fog,” he answers. “Of course it’s creepy. But…” He holds his hand out. “It’s not acidic. And it’s the living you have to watch out for, not the dead.”  

“Is that a reference to me?” she tries to joke, but when Bellamy just twists his mouth up into an expression that’s part-smile, and mostly-grimace, because he hates when she talks about herself like that, she grabs for his hand and gives it a tight squeeze—which is just something that they do, sometimes. 

For a while, they continue on in silence, a peaceful calm punctuated only by the arrhythmic crunch of leaves under their feet. Clarke finds herself staring at the gravestones as they pass: most of them are too old, too distorted by the elements, by time, to read. Sometimes a part of a name or a partial date remains legible. A _beloved_. A _rest in peace_.  

“All these people,” Bellamy says, breaking the calm so suddenly that Clarke jumps, then pretends she didn’t. He glances over to her, then away. “They must have died before the bombs.”  

“Yeah, probably,” she agrees. “I doubt anyone had much chance to bury their dead like this, in the…the chaos. After.” As her voice trails off, she reaches out to run her hand over the top of a squat, rectangular stone, rough and cold and, perhaps for this, a shock straight to her spine. She pulls her hand away fast. “No time for gravestones in the middle of the apocalypse.”  

Or in its aftermath, neither one adds. They mark their own dead with simple wooden markers. Some, like the early dropship casualties, like Wells, like Finn, like Maya and the Mt. Weather victims, they buried without signal at all. It hardly seems to matter. The living will remember, and if their memories die with them, it is no more a loss than the one always created by time. 

“And no room for them in space,” Bellamy adds. He does not look at her, and she cannot, for once, read the tone of his voice.  

The fog is drifting in thicker all around them, so that the gravestones appear now as drifting, unmoored symbols, approaching, creeping up, then falling away again. Clarke makes out an ornately carved family name and a few dates etched into a large granite block, the first names all but obliterated by creeping moss, and she wonders if this means they were buried together, and she asks, "Do you wish you could visit your mother?"  

Talking about their parents is not—usually—something they do.  

Bellamy looks back at her with an expression equal parts thoughtful and surprised, and she considers that perhaps he has never asked himself this before. Then: "Yes," he admits. "When—when I first visited the graves at the dropship, it felt stupid. Almost wrong somehow, to think of their bodies just..." He makes a face, disgusted and disturbed, like he's picturing rotting flesh, eaten by worms, hidden skeletons in the ground. He shakes the image away and continues, "But then I—it's not that I'll forget otherwise. It's just nice to know there's a place where nothing else will—distract me. A place that's just for remembering." A pause, and he shrugs, a disingenuous gesture that she doesn't believe, and isn't meant to. "Never had that on the Ark."  

She remembers his speech, before they attempted to leave the dropship camp. _Our dead are buried here_. Home, we've found a home, he'd meant; our dead are our roots; our memories have merged with the soil itself, in this settlement we've barely started building up from the ground.  

Before Clarke can answer, though, and she does want to answer, though reassurance is hollow and empathy fits so uneasily into words, she's startled out of her half-formed thoughts by a touch—gentle and tentative, like an exhale of breath—against the back of her neck.  

"What was that?"  

She's stopped right in the middle of the path, frozen with expectation and wariness, and it takes a moment for Bellamy to stop too. He’s a step ahead of her but his hand is still in hers, tethered to her.  

"What was what?" He sounds frustrated, a bit impatient, because she's changed the subject or because her sudden suspicion has stopped them both up short, she doesn’t know.  

"That. That feeling like—there's someone behind me."   

She half turns to look, but there's only fog twirling up around her feet, and Bellamy's voice as he takes both of her hands now in his own: "Clarke, there's nothing there. Come on, let's keep going. We've got to be more than halfway through by now."  

The memory of the touch, not quite a physical touch, but too real and too present to be some mere trick of her imagination, keeps her frozen. She moves only to scan her eyes around the graveyard, but sees little more than a mass of shapes peering up out of the mist. "No. I felt something. Something on the back of my neck."  

"It was probably a breeze or something. Let's go—it's almost dark. And the fastest way out is through."  

Clarke opens her mouth to insist again that she _knows_ what she _felt_ and there _is no breeze_ , but the insistent tone in Bellamy's voice catches her instead. So she lets out her tension with a deep sigh, forces a smile, and answers, "Well if you're so desperate to get out of here, I guess we should just go."  

"Hey, I'm not desperate for anything. But I would like to get some rest tonight," he answers, with a smile of his own that seems less forced than hers, and pulls her into step beside him again. The way his fingers twine with hers is reassuring. So is the heavy crunch of his boots against the dry leaves. And as they pass by a stone angel, floating up out of the fog, her broken hand seeming to point the way out at last, Clarke starts to wonder if perhaps it _was_ only her mind playing tricks on her after all.

"Did you feel that?" Bellamy asks suddenly, and startles her out of her reverie.  

"Feel what?"  

" _That_." He's using his free hand to rub at his shoulder, confusion furrowing between his brows as he glances behind him, searching out the source of some mysterious touch.  

"Not the wind, is it?" Clarke returns, though there's nothing mean or teasing in her voice. Her tone is flat, and there is a chill undercurrent of fear to her words. Because this cannot be avoided. She knows her own imagination well by now, her nightmares and hallucinations, what the uncanny manifestations of her worst fears feel and sound and taste like—and she imagines Bellamy knows his own demons just as intimately—and this is something else.  

"No," Bellamy agrees. "Not the wind."  

She glances over, catches his eye, feels her own forced resolution reflected there. 

They turn forward again, and continue down the path. They do not talk about what is happening, as if they do not dare to talk, or because they do not need to. Touches so subtle they must be ghost touches, spirit touches, start to tap across Clarke’s shoulders and down Bellamy’s spine, and their hands grip together so hard their knuckles have turned white. 

Neither has any clear idea, of course, of how far the cemetery stretches, or even if their path is the fastest way through, but Clarke has to believe that forward is better than backward, has to believe that a logical, set, clear decision will matter more than the whispering getting louder in her ears, the gentle almost-nothing sensation of fingers she has started to feel running up and down her arms.  

She knows without asking that Bellamy feels these things too, hears them too.  

"Have you ever...felt anything like this before?" Bellamy asks, slowly, his words caught in a sudden and impossible gust of wind. As it dissipates, and the leaves that twirled around them settle again, and they stand stone-still for a long moment, waiting, she realizes she's pressed up against him, back to his broad chest, and shakes her head.  

And what does that mean? That their people are more skilled at finding their way to the afterlife? That the Earth will not keep them, will not accept even their spirits after generations of exodus?  

They start walking again, quickening their pace, until ahead of them, barely visible through the dense fog, a second gate just like the first appears in view. The way out at last. A part of her wants to run. But that would be admitting, admitting to herself truly, that the scritch-scritch whispers in her ear are real, that the nails down her arms and back are real, that the chill deep in her bones is not from the cool autumn air, but from something else, not of this world and not to be named by the language of this world.  

"Yeah," Bellamy whispers. "Just keep going. Like this."  

_Stay, stay, stay_ , the creaky whisper voices murmur right into her ear. _Stay, stay here_. And as they murmur to her, lull her, one, two, three, four fingers slowly wrap around her ankle. And squeeze. And hold on tight.  

"Are you limping? What happened?" Bellamy's loud-clear voice, so much more real and solid and _there_ than what is holding her, and enough to buoy her up, is laced with deep concern. He tugs her forward, and she shakes her head, shakes her leg to get it _off_ , staring at him with wide eyes as if, enchanted, she were forbidden speech.  

"It's—something's— _got_ me," she hisses. They're only a few feet from the gate, and Bellamy's tugging at her hand, searching wildly for the _something,_ seeing nothing. There is nothing to see. "Just—stomp on it. Anything!" She tries again, gesturing back with her head to where she thinks the thing must be. And how will this help? Why would a being without a body recoil from physical pain that it cannot feel? But she's desperate, and it's the first thought that comes to her mind, and Bellamy listens with the instinct of experience and crushes his heel down behind her before the words are even out of her mouth. 

Still she feels the fingers, deep cold as if cold itself had taken an invisible shape, grabbing her, pulling. She drags this heavy shackle of the dead with her, as she leans on Bellamy, half dragged by him in turn, until they get finally to the gates, standing, tall and grim, with mythic proportions above them.  

Clarke staggers out a few words: "If they're locked—"  

"We'll tear them down with our bare hands," Bellamy finishes, and leans his shoulder hard against the gate, and pulls her through the second it creaks open on its rusted, slow hinges.   

The sudden shock of exit, the cruel hand around her ankle abruptly forced free, the warm after-sensation of absence when she realizes the cool, curious, wandering fingertips are gone too, all combine to leave her gasping for breath. Bellamy looks just as winded. They are no longer grasping hands but he's got his hand on her shoulder, steadying himself or steadying her, or both, she cannot tell.  

"You okay?" she asks him.  

"Yeah, you?"  

"Yeah."  

They glance back at the graveyard, almost invisible through great swaths of fog though the air around them is clear, then at each other, and Bellamy asks slowly, "Do you still hear it?" and she nods.  

The whispers follow them as they walk into town, examining old rotten buildings, hoping one will pass for decent shelter. They finally duck into a low, squat house, cob-webbed and dusty but stable; Bellamy spreads out his jacket on the floor while Clark peers through the windows at nothing, at darkness.  

"I don't think it's followed us," Bellamy tells her.  

 She counters (not snapping, but a plea): "Then why can we still _hear_ it?"  

He doesn't answer, because he doesn't have to. It does not follow them, because it is in them. And maybe it has been for a while.

Slowly, the heels of her boots too loud against the old wood floor, she walks back to him, and they settle in the corner of the room. Bellamy keeps his arm around her shoulders. Clarke keeps her ear against his heart. The whispering might be in their ears, might be in the walls, might be in the wind beyond the windows: neither can tell. But they both hear it. And they hear the sound of feet, crunching over leaves. And the sound of heavy objects moving. And the sound sometimes of running, sometimes of stomping, sometimes of fists pounding hard against the walls.  

They tell each other they'll stay up, just in case, until the sun rises and they can stumble back into Arkadia in the clear familiar light of day. But both drift off sometime in the middle of the infinite darkness, and when they wake, to dust motes floating in a shaft of sun, blinking and squinting in the harsh rays of morning, they realize the sounds have dissipated just like the memories of a nightmare when the morning comes, and that all is silence now, and still.  


End file.
